The car and climate conundrum

We love our cars and trucks. Who can blame us? With our vehicles, we can go wherever we want, whenever we want. They are our ticket to freedom and mobility. This is particularly true in San Diego County, where we are almost completely dependent on the automobile. Unfortunately, our strong love may blind us to the downsides of our relationship to cars and trucks.

The fact is that we use – and waste – tremendous amounts of energy to drive our families, our friends and ourselves around our region. Personal transportation accounts for nearly half of all regional greenhouse gas emissions. So, if we hope to reach the intermediate and long-term emission reduction targets adopted in California and discussed in Copenhagen, we must tackle the vexing problem of personal mobility.

The solutions are many: improve efficiency to squeeze more miles out of every gallon of fuel we use, expand use of cleaner fuels such as biofuels or electricity, and reduce the number of miles we drive annually.

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The good news is that Sacramento and Washington have taken actions to increase vehicle fuel efficiency and the use of cleaner fuels through technological improvements. The bad news is that these improvements will not reduce the amount of time we spend in traffic and they could be eroded if we continue to increase the number of miles that we drive annually. So, despite the number of hybrid and electric vehicles on the market, it will be increasingly important to find ways to reduce our driving habit.

California lawmakers understood this when they passed a law, SB 375, in 2008 that requires regions to develop plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through changes in land use and transportation planning. The San Diego region is the first in the state to have to comply with the new law and a significant part of the discussion will be how to reduce our use of automobiles.

One of the many options to get us out of our cars is to eliminate our commute. Ubiquitous digital technology and readily available bandwidth makes telecommuting more viable then ever for some of us. If we must travel to work, another option is to increase the number of passengers in each commuting vehicle through carpooling and van pooling.

While these measures can have a modest impact, expanding the mass transit system in our region would have the biggest effect on reducing congestion, greenhouse gases, vehicle use, and creating jobs. Today only about 3.5 percent of us use our mass transit system to commute to work every day. To persuade us to take the bus or trolley to work, those services must be almost as attractive, fast and convenient as getting into our cars.

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It is possible to implement within a decade a transit expansion that could offer viable options for commuters. Unfortunately, under current economic conditions, local governments are strapped for cash and the state is cutting funding for transit. A new method of financing transportation infrastructure may be needed – one that keeps money circulating in the region and over which we have more local control.

One possibility that could place a disincentive on vehicle use and potentially generate revenue for mass transit and other local solutions to getting us out of our vehicles is to put a price on our driving habit.

How does pricing work? We all got a glimpse of the power of pricing in 2007, when gasoline prices increased dramatically. In response, many of us changed our driving habits. Whether it was bundling errands, vacationing locally, using mass transit or carpooling with friends and colleagues, we drove less.

San Diego County residents are familiar with at least one road pricing system. The high occupancy toll used on Interstate 15 was one of the first examples in the United States of a pricing program to reduce congestion. Carpools, van pools and buses can use the high-occupancy vehicle lanes free of charge. Single-occupant vehicles can also use the lanes if drivers are willing to pay a fee via a transponder attached to each car.

Other pricing options include zone-specific tolls, where drivers pay a fee to enter a certain portion of a city, and tolls charged to drivers based on how many miles they drive. These policies allocate the cost of transportation infrastructure based on usage rather than spreading the costs equally among the populous.

All of these options have been used in other parts of the world to achieve significant fuel use reductions. If adopted, pricing policies could set into motion a virtuous cycle to help curb our dependence on the automobile while at the same time helping to fund alternatives, thus breaking the vicious cycle of highway expansion and inevitable congestion.

As we begin the regional dialogue about how to reduce emissions from cars and trucks, it might be instructive to look to the European experience. Even though Europe has reduced greenhouse gas emissions overall by 7.7 percent over the past 15 years, emissions associated with cars and trucks have increased by 27 percent – this despite relatively high rates of mass transit use and compact cities.

If we see this as a canary in the coal mine, we know that reducing emissions from cars and trucks will be a significant challenge and we need to get started now. Let’s hope that our love for the automobile does not blind us to the options that can help balance our mobility needs with our need to reduce greenhouse gases.

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Silva-Send is a senior policy analyst at the Energy Policy Initiatives Center of the University of San Diego School of Law.